Proportion of college-educated soars in Connecticut over the decades

Data Editor

Students are attending the first week of class at most colleges in Connecticut, so TrendCT decided to dig into Census data to look at trends in college graduation.

What we found is that the proportion of residents who have a higher education has far more than doubled since 1970.

Back then, only 15 percent of the state’s population had attended four years of college or gained at least a bachelor’s degree. In 2012, the proportion was 39 percent.

While most towns have seen a gradual increase over time in the percentage of residents with college degrees, a handful of towns showed declines between 2000 and 2012, including Mansfield, home of the University of Connecticut.

Towns where percent of residents with at least four years of college declined between 2000 and 2012.

Andrew is a data editor at TrendCT.org and the Connecticut Mirror. He teaches data visualization at Central Connecticut State University as well intro to data journalism at Wesleyan University as a Koeppel Fellow.
He was a founding producer of The Boston Globe's Data Desk where he used a variety of methods to visualize or tell stories with data. Andrew also was an online producer at The Virginian-Pilot and a staff writer at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. He’s a Metpro Fellow, a Chips Quinn Scholar, and a graduate of the University of Texas.